But ultimately, it was team 40 Piece Chicken McNuggets that was labeled the winner at the 29th annual Engineering Design Contest, an event that closes out the two-term ME72 class at Caltech by giving students the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned in a fun, high-energy and competitive environment.

This year’s theme was “Raiders of the Lost Can,” and was part “Battlebots,” the TV show, and part king of the hill, the classic playground game. Students had to maneuver robots they designed either on the basketball court inside Brown Gymnasium, or fly around it, to collect an empty soup can and get it to as close to the top a wooden hill after four-minute rounds. The robots could be defensive but not destructive of opposing teams. Visiting nearby schoolchildren made for a loud and high-energy audience during the contest that Gunnar Risproph and Dave Zobel emceed.

“This is where rubber meets the road,” said Carl Ruoff, instructor of ME72: Engineering Design Laboratory.

Ruoff has led the competition for three of its 29 years. Usually, teams work to collect small objects to rack up points. This year took a more contact-sport approach, but gave students insight into building something sturdy, Ruoff said. Students had been working all semester designing and constructing their robots in class, readying them for the big competition. Each team had an $800 budget.

“It’s all very practical,” Ruoff said. “You don’t want engineers making rockets that go into the ocean instead of into orbit.”

To bring their ‘bots to victory over five other teams, 40 Piece Chicken McNuggets only made two identical rovers that drove instead of flew.

“We wanted redundancy in our designs,” said team member Justin Koch, a Caltech junior. “We think we had a strong offense and defense, since both our designs were similar.”

In the final round, it came down to the McNuggets and the Cunning Stunts, which utilized their $800 budget to make three roving and one flying design, more than any other team. But by the end of all the four-minute elimination rounds full of robo-crashes, misfires and defensive maneuvers from its opponents, Cunning Stunts only had two ground robots left for the final round against the McNuggets.

“They were faster than us,” said Cunning Stunts member Harrison Miller, a junior at Caltech.

The Soup Nazis, a team based on the “Seinfeld” TV show, also had a flying quadcopter named Elaine and a tank named Kramer.

“This guy (Kramer) gets in the way and tries to take the can,” said Juan Pablo Ocampo, team member and Caltech junior.

Team Avengers also went on the defense, building two rovers named Iron Man and Hulk to bulldoze any nearby components that got too close.

“We’re more or less trying to get up there and deter others since our vehicles are more muscular,” said Caltech junior Richie Hernandez, of the Avengers team.

Advertisement

The only part left of the class is for students to write a report on what they learned. Junior Christopher Culpepper of the Soup Nazis learned how to implement his schoolwork into a real-world application, and then bringing it to life.

“Up to this point, it had all been mechanical engineering,” Culpepper said. “At this point, this is when we added electronics.”